N.Sea Oilfield Plans 25 Days Maintenance

Reuters - Britain's biggest oilfield Buzzard will undergo 25 days of planned maintenance starting in late July, its operator Nexen confirmed on Friday.

During this period production will be offline but the outage coincides with the planned 14-day shutdown of the Forties Pipeline System (FPS), which is scheduled to begin at the end of July, Nexen said.

Buzzard is the largest single contributor to the Forties crude stream, which is one of the four benchmark crudes underpinning the price of dated Brent and Brent crude oil futures.

Previously Suncor Energy (SU), which has a 29.9 percent stake in the Buzzard field, indicated that Buzzard would also undergo maintenance in May and September. Nexen said some of this information was "incorrect".

It added that third-party constraints on gas export might not prevent oil production in the second quarter and that it was working on a solution.

The St Fergus gas terminal, which processes the gas exported from Buzzard, has a planned shutdown for 28 days, beginning at the end of May.